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Thursday, May 3, 2018

Cyber security must be separated from online intelligence agencies such as NSA and GCHQ. NSA negligence caused its vicious hacking tools to be released to the entire world for use by state adversaries, organized crime-Emily Taylor, Chatham House, 9/2017...(2017 global WannaCry hacking attack used NSA technology that had been published on the internet)

. NSA 2009-2012 became GCHQ's Daddy: Aug. 1, 2013, “Exclusive: NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ,” UK Guardian, N. Hopkins, J. Borger (100 million British pounds is$136 million US dollarsas of 5/3/18) "The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQover the last three years [2009-2012] to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes....It raises the possibility that GCHQ might have been spying on an
American living in the US. The NSA is prohibited from doing this by US
law....GCHQ seems desperate to please its American benefactor."
...............

"Until 1994, GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, didn't
officially exist. Now, it has emerged out of the shadows to take a very
public role at the heart of British cybersecurity.

Public accountability for intelligence services is crucial to any democracy but, as the recent WannaCry ransomware attack showed, there are inevitable conflicts of interest between the role of intelligence services and network safety.

The
past seven years have seen a dramatic change in profile for GCHQ. While
the number of police officers has been cut by 14 per cent since 2010,
GCHQ's staff numbers - according to the Home Office - have grown by more
than ten per cent in the same period.

At the same time, it has
been loaded with additional responsibilities, including the fight
against distribution of child-abuse images on the dark web, money laundering and financial fraud.

This was made official when, in February 2017, it assumed
responsibility for making the UK "the safest place to do business
online" through the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

This
rapid increase in power is the result of GCHQ's own competence. A dearth
of expertise in government hasled to a reliance on the intelligence
service to fill gaps.

The same leak
contains powerful exploits that could be weaponised by state
adversaries, organised crime or by anyone possessing basic technical
knowledge - as we saw with the Petya ransomware attack in Eastern
Europe.

This is the challenge the [UK] National Cyber Security Centre faces. By its
own description, the NCSC was set up "to help protect our critical
services from cyber attacks, managing major incidents and improve the
underlying security of the UK internet".

Eternal Blue was
published online by the mysterious group of hackers known as the Shadow
Brokers, which began releasing secrets in 2015.Their drop followed a
release by WikiLeaks of nearly 9,000 documents exposing hacks developed
by the CIA.

We do not know how these details were released, but it's easy to see
how leaks could develop. Security professionals such as those at the
NCSC believe strongly in their work combating threats to the safety of
the network, so the practice of hoarding zero-day vulnerabilities would
be troubling to them.

Within intelligence agencies such as GCHQ, it can be difficult to raise concerns internally, increasing the
potential security threat from insiders. If an employee's legitimate
worries aren't being heard, it could lead to whistle-blowing - with a
disastrous impact on national security.

"Root Cause"

"WannaCry's origins stretch back to April [2017], when a
group of mysterious hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers
publicly released a trove of stolen NSA code. The tools included an
until-then-secret hacking technique known as EternalBlue, which exploits
flaws in a Windows protocol known as Server Message Block to remotely
take over any vulnerable computer.

While the NSA
had warned Microsoft about EternalBlue after it was stolen, and
Microsoft had responded with a patch in March, hundreds of thousands of
computers around the world hadn't yet been updated. When WannaCry
appeared the next month, it used the leaked exploit to worm through that
massive collection of vulnerable machines, taking full advantage of the
NSA's work.

Despite those security breaches, Bossert's [former Trump official] 800-word statement about
"accountability" for the North Korea's hackers who created and launched
WannaCry didn't once mention the NSA's accountability for creating, and
failing to secure, the ingredients for that disaster, notes Jake
Williams, a former NSA hacker himself and the founder of Rendition
Infosec...."North Korea couldn't have
done this without us. We enabled the operation by losing control of
those tools....To have a discussion about accountability for North Korea without the
discussion of how they got the material for the attack in the first
placeis irresponsible at best and deceptive at worst.""...